Mildew & Rust. Moths & Blowing Dust

She preferred her dresses barely there and this one was no exception. It wasn’t so much that a dress should show vast expanses of pearly skin, though this one certainly did. After dashing across her front, just beneath her collarbones, the neck line traversed a scapular curve at a dire, hurtling angle, and swept back up over the other shoulder blade just as abruptly. This dress was barely there in that perfect way; it hung across her frame delicately and yet moved with her like an aura. Like a razor thin cloud of silvery ephemera. In candle-light, she glowed. In passing headlights, she shimmered.


And the best thing about this cad on her arm was that he never noticed. She could set her emerald irises in a field of smoky grays such that they suggested men would fight wars in her honor, and he would spend the whole evening behind a scotch and a cigar, content to kiss her cheek on every entrance and exit. She was, for him, much like his cuff links; dashing accoutrement that, if left at home, would be unfortunate but, after all, the night would go on. Tonight, she’d feign a yawn and tuck her fingers beneath the lapel of his coat.

“I’m tired,” she exhaled, brushing his ear with just the hint of her bottom lip. He produced some bills and she received them along with a last kiss for her cheek in all those masculine aromas.


And wherever the taxi took her, she had hours before the illusion required she was home. There were, of course, men who loved her. Probably one each in every surrounding postal code. Men who would have stolen her away to any number of warm, Catholic places for the rest of history. And she told them how she loved the sound of escape. And, in the mean time, she let them buy her things she had no place to wear. Every single one wondered why she never spent the night.

And every morning she woke up before him in that sprawling bed and thought with fear that she would always love the man who never called her by her name.